It's been a crazy few months for the team at Cyanogen Inc.. After announcing the partnership with Oppo, the new company cofounded by Steve Kondik and Koushik Dutta has released a CyanogenMod installer app, built a Google-approved ROM for the N1, and secured a mess of funding. Now there's a YouTube channel where you can follow the exploits of the CM crew, and it all starts with a demo of the Oppo N1 running the official CyanogenMod ROM.

The CyanogenMod team has been working on a secure messaging component for the popular ROM in recent months, and the time has come for some real world testing. The new encrypted WhisperPush messaging system is being rolled out to CyanogenMod 10.2 nightlies for compatibility and server load testing. If all goes as planned, it will reach the CM11 branch soon.

CyanogenMod's secure messaging is an implementation of TextSecure, a cross-platform encrypted SMS platform maintained by Open WhisperSystems.

OmniROM has only existed for a few weeks, but it's already gaining traction with certain groups (you know who you are). The first nightly builds of OmniROM based on Android 4.4 supported 15 devices, and today brings six more to the fold.

As part of an effort to expand adoption of CyanogenMod, the developers recently released the CyanogenMod Installer app in Google Play. All was well for a few weeks, but today Google contacted the CyanogenMod team to explain that the installer app was in violation of Google Play’s policies. So, the CM folks agreed to take the app down.

The app acts as a tool to help users get their devices connected to a computer over ADB – it doesn't actually do any of the heavy lifting of unlocking and flashing the device.

After a bit of testing, the CyanogenMod Installer app has hit Google Play for everyone. When combined with the desktop client (and a USB cable), this becomes the fastest way to install CyanogenMod. It won't work on every phone, but it completely automates things on supported devices.

HTC takes the Developer Edition HTC One pretty seriously. The company has been good about pushing updates to the device, and now the full Android 4.3 ROM can be downloaded as a ZIP from the HTC Dev website. That's more service than even the Google Play Edition HTC One is getting.

As the announcement of Android 4.4 KitKat (presumably) draws closer, the Paranoid Android team has decided to make some changes to the way the popular ROM is managed. On the agenda is a complete rewrite of Paranoid Android with a focus on making a highly stable ROM targeted at fewer devices. That doesn't necessarily mean it won't run on your device, but things are about to change.

According to the G+ post, the core team has decided to move away from the model of having everyone support individual devices.

CyanogenMod is already one of the most polished Android ROMs out there, but as the dev team says in the most recent blog post, running a custom OS shouldn't mean you're lacking first-class features. To that end, CyanogenMod ROMs will soon include CyanogenMod Account for encrypted device management. The account provider is already in CM's Github, but don't get too ahead of yourself – the CyanogenMod Account isn't rolling out right away.

The developers behind ParanoidAndroid have been busy building incremental updates to the popular ROM. It's usually a few bug fixes and a couple new features, but the newest version of ParanoidAndroid contains something super-cool. Halo 2.0 has been demoed on video as part of PA 3.97.

Halo is ParanoidAndroid's custom multitasking system that works on the same premise as Facebook Chat Heads. A tiny floating icon can be used to retrieve notifications and background apps without leaving the current application.

While most Android users are waiting on updaters that might patch some of the recently reported security holes, CyanogenMod is already getting a bug fix update out the door. CyanogenMod 10.1.1 is now hitting the stable channel for all supported devices.

The Master Key exploit will be presented by Jeff Forristal at Black Hat 2013 as "One Root To Own Them All." It's essentially a bug in signature verification which can be used to insert malicious code into an APK.